In the last two years I've found the world of staples clearance. All you need is one of their great clearance coupons and a little luck and sometimes you can get something nice for cheap. (I used to hate staples, but they've been winning me over lately, especially the one in Reading.)

Canon cameras can be scripted using chdk and I use this to take a photo of my taiko performances once ever 10 seconds so we can have something to post to facebook. I bought a super cheap, old, used canon to implement this but it was starting to flake out on me, so I decided to see if the staples $50 off clearance cameras would work for me. I tried one staples, and didn't find what I wanted, but on the way home from the gig I decided to up my budget a little bit (I was hoping for something sub $50) for something that had a better chance of taking good action shots in low light with no flash. On the way home from today's gig I dropped in to the staples and found a SX40 HS. (The staples was mobbed with back to school people.)

Normally this is a ~$320 camera, it rang up at the cash at $209, the sign, however had said $157, so the manager changed it to $150 and then my $50 off coupon brought it to $100.

I'm not sure how well it will do in low lite, despite the larger lense, but the noise at high ISO isn't so bad. Though it's max iso is 3200.